Mobile computing devices, such as, for example, smartphones and tablets, may include, as part of a mobile platform used by the mobile computing device, a component, which may be part of the operating system, capable of managing user accounts on the mobile computing device. For example, a user may have an account in an umbrella ecosystem. The umbrella ecosystem may include an application ecosystem from which the user can download, install, and manage application on the mobile computing device, and other services, such as email, cloud storage, maps and navigation, and web search. The user's account in the umbrella ecosystem, or umbrella account, may include credentials such as a username and password that can be used to access the user's data in the umbrella ecosystem. The application ecosystem and other services may each be accessed from the mobile computing device using an associated application. For example, an application store application may be used to access the application ecosystem, and an email application may be used to access the user's email account in the umbrella ecosystem. Because the application ecosystem and other services are part of the same umbrella ecosystem, they may all obtain proper credentials to access the user's data from the umbrella account stored on the mobile computing device.
The user accounts managed by the component of the mobile platform, for example, the operating system or a separately installed application, of the mobile computing device may be available device-wide. Every application installed on the mobile computing device may have access to any user account stored on the mobile computing device and managed by the component of the mobile platform. For example, when a first user logs-in to their umbrella account on a second user's mobile computing device, the applications installed on the second user's mobile computing device may gain access to the first user's data in the umbrella ecosystem. The email application on the second user's computing device may access the first user's email from the umbrella ecosystem's servers, and may mix the email with the second user's email.
Some applications may establish their own user accounts on the mobile computing device. These third-party user accounts may not be managed by the component of the mobile platform, and may not be available to any other applications on the mobile computing device. For example, an application may store user account credentials, such as a user name and password or token, with the application's data instead of with the user accounts that are managed by the operating system. Third-party user accounts may be less secure than user accounts managed by a component of the mobile platform, and may be difficult to share among applications.